Month: July 2015

The Grammar Rabble will sponsor two roundtable session at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, at the University of Western Michigan, May 12–15, 2016. We are seeking short paper proposals on the following topics:

Erratic Letters

In geology, an ‘erratic’ stone is one that does not match the stones surrounding it, one that seems to have wandered in from another place. This panel would consider the ‘erratic’ letter—the letter that has failed to be pinned down, failed to maintain a constant materiality, or failed to keep its materiality in a persistent location. This session will seize upon such erratic letters—perhaps the letter transposed or misread by the copyist, perhaps the letter from a foreign alphabet unexpectedly placed in a new context—as a Lucretian ‘swerve’, a moment when the text becomes alive to new interpretive possibilities.

Kinky Grammar

Medieval European grammar was commonly associated with the straight line, as in…